The Event

The Chemnitz Linuxday is the second biggest event around the Linux
operating system in Germany, with almost 2000 visitors this year. It took
place on march 1st and 2nd at the Technical University of
Chemnitz, Germany. Besides many presentations and workshops
there were demonstrations for various topics like schools,
office applications, games, multimedia, and also a booth
showing NetBSD as an alternative to Linux. Further events
included a "medical office" where people could bring their
Linux machines and get problems fixed, a PGP Sign Party,
Internet access, a Lego Robot construction corner including
Lego Sumo competition.

A couple of NetBSD enthusiasts decided to present their
operating system as an alternative to the alternative to
Windows, and there was quite some interest in it!

The Presentations

During the two days, there were about 50 presentations,
covering various topics: LaTeX, text-tools, society,
WWW-scripting, applications, multimedia, security, schools,
Debian, E-learning, beginner's sessions and introductions and
NetBSD.

In contrast to past Linux events I have attended, there was
a whole (although small, but still) BSD Track at this event!
It consisted of three presentations on sunday afternoon,
telling people about an"Introdoction to NetBSD" by Karl-Uwe
Lockhoff as well as "News in NetBSD 1.6 and use in embedded
applications" and "Using NetBSD in a video rendering cluster"
by Hubert Feyrer.

The NetBSD Booth

We had the usual NetBSD booth with CDs, books, stickers, pins,
posters, plush daemons, flyers etc. Machines on display were
a PC running KDE, a laptop running KOffice as well as an
HP300 machine showing NetBSD on a hardware most of the visitors
at the Linux event were not familiar with. Questions we got
included (of course) the differences between NetBSD and Linux
as well as the other BSD derivates, but also detailed questions
on the NetBSD packages system, updating both base system and
packages, device drivers and USB 2.0 (testing a PCMCIA USB2.0
card and harddisk we found that there are still a few issues,
but at least NetBSD gets further than Linux :-).